Does homeschooling affect getting into college? Hmm... The answer may surprise
you. I'm Nicholeen Peck and I'm a lifetime homeschooler. I'm also a parenting expert.
And in this video, we're going to help you prepare your children for college if they choose to go.
So, I have 4 children and 3 of my four children at this point have been off to college. And I want
you to know that homeschooling does affect college and homeschooling doesn't affect college. So,
this is a yes and a no. In this video, we're going to talk about the yeses and talk about the nos and
hopefully get it so that you're prepared to get your child ready for college. And as a bonus,
in this video, if you stay with me to the end, I'm going to talk about how to prepare your homeschool
high school student for college. Maybe even how to prepare when your child is little. So, join
me at the end for that bonus content. So, does homeschooling affect your child going to college?
First, let's address no. They're not going to stop your child from attending their college
just because your child was homeschooled. That's not how colleges work. In fact,
if anything they're getting more and more used to homeschoolers all the time. However,
as part of the entrance process just like everybody else, your student will have to
take a college entrance exam so that they know where they rank compared to all the other students
and to be sure that your child is college ready. Now, this is if you're going to a big university,
usually a lot of the community colleges things like that, they don't even require an entrance
exam at all. So, if for some reason *oops* your child missed taking an entrance exam and they
want to start college immediately, well they could go to a community college and be totally ready to
move on from there. As long as you have had 15 credits at an accredited college or university,
then you don't usually need a college entrance exam. So, what a lot of homeschoolers do
is they start their children really young at a community college and then by the time the
child is 18 years old, they usually already have an associate's degree or very near 2
or at least 15 credits and that way if they never got around to the ACT or the SAT, most colleges
they're going to would never care anyway. Now, make sure if there's some really prestigious
college that you want to attend, you check with them and see what their entrance requirements are
if you happen to be a homeschooler. Because sometimes it's different. I'm just telling
you across the board what it usually looks like. Now, our family did not do the community college
approach. We did actually take a college entrance exam and it was no big deal. Especially, because
there are all kinds of people that will teach you nowadays online how to do great on those exams.
And if your children are good students anyway, you really don't need to worry about it. As far as
applying goes, one thing you have to remember as a homeschool parent is that it's up to you to make a
transcript for your child. So, some parents make a transcript all the way along. Each year they write
down we're doing this course, we're doing foods because maybe the child has like a weekly cook day
or something like that or maybe they really are doing an actual foods class. But they write down
what the child earned, grade wise in all of those classes for a transcript that will later be shown
to the college or university of your choice. But if you forgot to make a transcript,
no sweat. What you do is you go back over the books you've read, the papers you've done,
things like that and you just sit down with the child and you remember back to all the
years that would be considered high school and what they did for those different years. Then
you should be able to come up with what type of classes that you had. You'll probably want to
know what are required classes to have. That's a smart thing to know ahead of time before you
even start making the transcript because do they have to have certain number of years of English,
certain number of years of math, or a certain level of math, or science that they need to get to
in your state? That's important for you to know. In fact, hopefully, you know that before you're
done with the high school years. Just so that you didn't miss something. So that's one thing to look
for ahead of time. And again, if you missed that just do the community college track because that's
a pretty easy way to make sure that you didn't have to cover every single class that every other
public school student might be covering. So, just out of curiosity, I'd love to know how old your
students are. Are they just about ready for college or are you looking ahead? Put a comment
down below. And if you have any questions about the process that we're talking about here, be sure
to let me know those too. So now, let's move on to the yes because yes. Being a homeschooler does
indeed affect going to college. But it doesn't always affect things in a bad way. Sometimes
it affects things in a good way. One of the good effects of being a homeschooler is there are many
colleges and universities that actually want your child to come to their school. They want a child
who knows how to think. They've got special programs where they want to run research. And they
need somebody who can think outside of the box and they know it. So, when I speak at home school
conferences all over the nation, there are always colleges and universities there trying to recruit
homeschoolers or to get homeschool families thinking of attending their college. Why would
they spend that much time? Well, because your students are special. They think differently.
Especially if your homeschool journey has been about them learning how to think, how to study,
how to do research, to discuss. Then they're already the kind of person that can think for
themselves and not have to be told how to do everything. Which means they can innovate and
the colleges and university, they want innovators. Another positive effect of homeschooling on your
college journey is children can start early. They don't have to wait until they're 18 or to do just
a basic concurrent enrollment class over at the school. They can start as early as they need to.
Now, sometimes you have to get special permission but many colleges if your child shows the aptitude
to be able to handle the rigor of the college or university classes in life, they will accept
them. They love being the honored college that gets to have this young student coming to campus
or joining them online. Also, there are many concurrent classes that colleges and universities
offer to parents even when their child is not in a concurrent enrollment program at the school.
So, you can just call up a college and say "Do you have a concurrent enrollment program or
homeschoolers? My child is looking at taking some classes." And when you are able to call like that,
you can pick any class. Not just the ones that are offered through the school district. Now, there
is one negative effect that can occur. It doesn't always occur but I have seen it happen a couple of
times that a particular homeschool student wants to attend a certain university. And then they
find out that that certain university has a higher test score requirement for home school students.
This isn't super common but it does happen at some universities where they might say, "Well,
at our school, if you're just coming in from any school the ACT score is this..." But then they
might say, "It's a point or 2 higher if you're homeschooled." I don't know why they do that there
might be a few colleges and universities that are biased. But the funny thing is is that one of the
main universities that I've heard of that has done this in the past, they also have been the
ones who are recruiting heavily the homeschoolers. So, those 2 things don't necessarily fit together.
My guess is that that practice has probably been discontinued but I just want to warn you
just in case. This was something that used to be an issue for some homeschoolers and could exist
at a college or university. So, just check. Make sure they know you're a homeschooler coming in.
They're not going to be freaked out. You don't need a lie or make things seem like they're
different than they are. Just call them up, tell them what's going on and they'll get you pointed
in the right direction. Alright, are you ready for that bonus material? Okay, we're going to talk
about what you can do to prepare your child for college. And these things might be things that
other people aren't doing. In fact, I know one of them for sure most people never think of doing.
And it's probably my most important thing that I do to prepare my students to enter college or
university. So, we've already mentioned in this video that it's really important to know how to
learn. But another thing that you need to prepare your child for is how to study. So, a person can
know how to learn, how to gather information, and organize the information. But do they really know
how to organize their time when it comes to that information? So, I learned this when one of my
children went to college and she said to me, "Mom, I am getting the most out of my stuff but I'm just
not getting everything done in time. The amount of reading and stuff that they want me to do and for
me to do it well is going to take way longer than the allotted time that I have." And I was like,
"Oh, no. I forgot one of the important lessons that you learn in public school which is don't
really learn it at all. Just go through it and get it done in a certain amount of time. I never
taught that to them. Instead, for some reason, I was always focusing on teaching my children
how to really learn, how to really gather out of it. I told them it's not about getting through
the material, it's about getting the material through you. But when you get to college,
that's not what it's about. Some of it, yes. But you're on a time crunch. You have 2 hours of class
homework for every single credit that you have. That is a lot of extra work. And if you're going
to fit in a job and regular life on top of that, no way. You won't have time for everything that
you want to do. So, you have to teach your child how to get through things quickly, how to skim,
how to annotate, how to find what's necessary. So, now I've got a child in college who's like,
"Mom, if it's an open book test, I don't even read it first. Seriously, I don't even need to."
I can just go back through and do a find like control find on my computer and I can find the
part read it, it's done. I'm like, "Okay, we did good things there." But the sad thing is
she's not getting as much out of that class. But you know what? She's getting straight A's. So,
it's all about what you need to get out of it. Do you need the grade out of it so that you're
done for the particular career where in her case, the answer is yes. My other daughter actually,
she really just wants the content so bad that she's willing to take less credit so that she
can go deeper like she wants to. So, anyway teach your children how to study quickly and how to
study for maximum impact. Those are 2 different types of study techniques. Part of that studying
is note-taking. So, don't forget the note-taking too. They need to know how to take quick notes
when somebody's listening. In fact, it could be a good idea to find audio talks or video talks that
your children can listen to, to practice taking notes with so that they're prepared for taking
notes from a professor. Because at home school, you don't usually do lectures in the same way that
they do it at the regular school where children have to learn how to take some notes down. Another
part of these study skills that they need to know is reading extraction. So, they need to know how
to extract maximum amount which means you need to teach the children how to go through a passage
and find the content, the main meat of the content without having to read the entire passage. So,
there's a great book that I had my children read and that I read years ago by Mortimer Adler called
How to Read a Book. He talks about how to do an inspectional reading. So, this inspectional
reading is like a first reading where you go through, you read all the highlighted parts,
all the headings. You read like maybe the first and last sentence of each paragraph
and you just kind of run through the book really, really fast. You go to the index,
you look at all the topics in the index. You pay special attention to the table of contents
and look at those things clearly so you have an organization for the material that's in the book.
And then after you go through all of that, in fact, if you find certain things in the index
and you go back into the text and find little bits on those and read what's interesting to you,
usually by the time you've done all that which doesn't take super long,
you have read the majority of the meat of the book anyway and you never have to read it. So,
you have to teach your children how to do skills like this so that they can get through all of
the material as quickly as possible. Also, social training. So, college is a different social time.
It doesn't compare to high school, junior high, or anything else that that student has done before.
So, prepare them how to interact socially with other people, how to solve problems
with roommates, how to be patient and put up with things that they wouldn't normally have to put up
with to be able to understand other people's viewpoints so that they don't have to feel
like they can't see eye to eye on anything with the other people around them because there are
so many viewpoints and ideologies out there now. This brings me to my favorite part of this bonus.
So, it's the bonus of the bonus. The bonus of the bonus is world views. If you forget everything
else I taught you in this bonus to prepare your child for college, remember this one thing:
Your children need to understand world views. There is a book that I have my children read and
discuss and even diagram with me before they are allowed to attend college or university classes.
And this book is called Understanding The Times and it's by David Noble. This book talks about
all the different world views and how they relate to all of the academics, subjects, the sciences,
the social sciences, everything. And this way when your children get into a philosophy class
or a civics class or a biology class or something that doesn't relate to their world view or belief
system and the teacher is presenting something to them that seems a little bit off, they can
identify very quickly and clearly what world view that that idea is part of. That way they can hold
on to their core beliefs. This is probably the thing that we're having the most trouble with
in society today is children who are raised really well having good core beliefs are turned out into
the college and university setting without an understanding of the different world views and
how those world views relate to their own world view. And so, then they get confused frustrated
and sometimes even lose connection with their own world view. So, teach your children world views.
Spend a summer doing it if you don't have any other time. But it is absolutely vital education
before your homeschooler starts college. There are so many skills that we need to teach our
children to prepare them for adult life. And one of those big skills is good communication.
Because you have watched this video, I have a gift for you and that gift is a free Calm Parenting
Toolkit. It's completely free. There's a link to it below this video in the description section.
It's on the teaching self-government website. So, go get the free Calm Parenting Toolkit
and talk about those principles of calm communication with your children. It will help
them succeed socially and academically because they'll be able to discuss anything in a calm way.